Classic Poem

A moon wore by,
And in the rainless waning of July
Ten thousand hearts were troubled where the creeks,
Young from the ancient winter of the peaks,
Romped in the mountain meadows green as May.
The very children lost the heart to play,
Awed by the shadow of an unseen thing,
As covies, when the shadow of a wing
Forebodes a pounce of terror from the skies.
They saw it in the bravest father's eyes —
That shadow — in the gentlest mother's face;
Unwitting how there fell upon a race
The twilight of irreparable wrong.
The drums had fallen silent with the song,
And valiant tales, late eager to be told,
Were one with all things glorious and old
And dear and gone forever from the Sioux.

For now the hunted prairie people knew
How powerful the Gray Fox camp had grown
On Goose Creek; how along the Yellowstone
The mounted soldiers and the walking ones —
A multitude — had got them wagon guns,
Of which the voice was thunder and the stroke,
Far off, a second thunder and a smoke
That bit and tore. A little while, and then
Those open jaws, toothed terribly with men,
Would move together, closing to the bite.
What hope was left in anything but flight?
And whither? O the world was narrow now!
South, east, the rat-like nibbling of the plow
Had left them but a little way to go.
The mountains of the never melting snow
Walled up the west. Beyond the northern haze,
There lay a land of unfamiliar ways,
Dark tongues and alien eyes.


As waters keep
Their wonted channels, yearning for the deep,
The homeless rabble took the ancient road.
From bluff to bluff the Rosebud valley flowed
Their miles of ponies; and the pine-clad heights
Were sky-devouring torches in the nights
Behind them, and a rolling gloom by day;
And prairies, kindled all along the way,
Bloomed balefully and blackened. Noon was dark,
Night starless, and the fleeing meadowlark
Forgot the morning. Where the Bluestone runs
Their dust bore east; and seldom did the suns
Behold them going for the seed they strewed
To crop the rearward prairie solitude
With black starvation even for the crow.
Creeks, stricken as with fever, ceased to flow
And languished in a steaming ashen mire.
But more than grass was given to the fire —
O memories no spring could render young!
And so it was that, marching down the Tongue,
The Gray Fox, seeking for the hostile bands,
Saw nothing but the desolated lands
Black to the sky; and when a dreary week
Had brought him to the mouth of Bluestone Creek,
Lo, Terry with another empty tale!

Broad as a road to ruin ran the trail
Of driven pony herds, a livid scar
Upon a vast cadaver, winding far
To eastward as the tallest hill might look.
And thither pressed the horse and foot of Crook,
Their pack mules, lighter for a greater speed,
With scant provisions for a fortnight's need
Upon their saddles.


Burning August waned
About the toiling regiments. It rained —
A sodden, chill monotony of rains —
As though the elements had cursed the plains,
And now that flame had stricken, water struck.
The scarecrow horses struggled with the suck
Of gumbo flats and heartbreak hills of clay;
And many a bone-bag fell beside the way
Too weak to rise, for still the draws were few
That were not blackened. Crows and buzzards knew
How little eager claws and whetted beaks
Availed them where so many hollow cheeks
Had bulged about a brief and cookless feast.

Still wearily the main trail lengthened east
By hungry days and fireless bivouacs;
And more and more diverging pony tracks,
To north and south, and tangent lodge pole trails
Revealed the hunted scattering as quails
Before a dreaded hunter. Eastward still
They staggered, nourished by a dogged will,
Past where a little river apes in mud
And name the genius of a titan flood
That drinks it. Crumbling pinnacles of awe
Looked down upon them; domes of wonder saw
The draggled column slowly making head
Against the muck; the drooping horses, led,
Well loaded with their saddles; empty packs,
Become a cruel burden on the backs
Of plodding mules with noses to the ground.
Along the deeps of Davis Creek they wound,
To where the Camel's Hump and Rosebud Butte
Behold the Heart's head.


Here the long pursuit,
It seemed, had come to nothing after all.
The multitude of Crazy Horse and Gall
Had vanished in that God-forsaken place
And matched their fagged pursuers for a race
With something grimmer than a human foe.
Four marches east across the dim plateau
Fort Lincoln lured them. Twice as many days
Beyond the dripping low September haze,
Due south across the yet uncharted lands,
Lay Deadwood, unprotected from the bands
Of prowling hostiles. 'Twas enough for Crook.
Half-heartedly the ragged column took
The way of duty.


And the foe appeared!
Where, like a god-built stadium, the tiered
Age-carven, Slim Buttes watch the Rabbit's Lip
Go groping for the ocean, in the drip
And ooze of sodden skies the battle raged;
And presences, millennially aged
In primal silence, shouted at the sight.
Until the rifles gashed the front of night
With sanguinary wounds, they fought it out;
And darkness was the end of it, and doubt
And drizzle. Unrejoicing victors knew
What enemy, more mighty than the Sioux,
Would follow with no lagging human feet;
And early morning saw them in retreat
Before that foe. Above their buried slain
A thousand horses trampled in the rain
That none might know the consecrated ground
To violate it.


Up and up they wound
Among the foggy summits, till the van
Was checked with awe. Inimical to Man,
Below them spread a featureless immense,
More credibly a dream of impotence
Than any earthly country to be crossed —
A gloomy flat, illimitably lost
In gauzes of the downpour.


Thither strove
The gaunt battalions. And the chill rain drove
Unceasingly. Through league on league of mire
Men straggled into camps without a fire
To wolf their slaughtered horses in the red;
And all the wallow of the way they fled
Was strewn with crowbaits dying in the bogs.
About them in the forest of the fogs
Lurked Crazy Horse, a cougar mad for blood;
And scarce the rearguard-battles in the mud
Aroused the sullen plodders to the fore,
The Deer's Ears loomed and vanished in the pour;
The Haystack Buttes stole off along the right;
And men grew old between a night and night
Before their feeble toil availed to raise
The black wall, set against the evil days
About a paradise of food and rest.

Now Crazy Horse's people, turning west,
Retraced the trail of ruin, sick for home.
Where myriads of the bison used to roam
And fatten in the golden autumn drowse,
A few rejected bulls and barren cows
Grew yet a little leaner. Every place
The good old earth, with ashes on her face,
Was like a childless mother in despair;
Though still she kept with jealous, loving care
Some little hoard of all her youth had known
Against the dear returning of her own;
But where the starving herd of ponies passed,
The little shielded hollows, lately grassed,
Were stricken barren even as with fire.
And so they reached the place of their desire,
The deep-carved valley where the Powder flows.
Here surely there was peace.


But when the snows
Came booming where the huddled village stood
And ponies, lean with gnawing cottonwood,
Were slain to fill the kettles. Dull Knife came,
The great Cheyenne. The same — O not the same
As he who fought beside the Greasy Grass
And slew his fill of enemies! Alas,
The beggar in his eyes! And very old
He seemed, for hunger and the pinch of cold
Were on him; and the rabble at his back —
Despairing hundreds — lacked not any lack
That flesh may know and live. The feeble wail
Of babies put an edge upon the tale
That Dull Knife told.


" There was a fight, " he said.
" I set my winter village at the head
Of Willow Creek. The mountains there are tall.
A canyon stood about me for a wall;
And it was good to hear my people sing,
For there was none that wanted anything
That makes men happy. We were all asleep.
The cold was sharp; the snow was very deep.
What enemy could find us? We awoke.
A thunder and a shouting and a smoke
Were there among us, and a swarm of foes —
Pawnees, Shoshones and Arapahoes,
And soldiers, many soldiers. It was night
About us, and we fought them in the light
Of burning lodges till the town was lost
And all our plenty. Bitter was the frost
And most of us were naked from the bed.
Now many of our little ones are dead
Of cold and hunger. Shall the others die? "

There was a light in Crazy Horse's eye
Like moony ice. The other spoke again.
" As brothers have Dakota and Cheyenne
Made war together. Help us. You have seen
We can not live until the grass is green,
My brother! "


Then the other face grew stone;
The hard lips moved: " A man must feed his own, "
Said Crazy Horse, and turned upon his heel.
But now the flint of him had found the steel
In Dull Knife, and the flare was bad to see.
" Tashunka Witko, dare to look at me
That you may not forget me. We shall meet.
The soldiers yonder have enough to eat,
And I will come, no beggar, with the grass! "

And silently the people saw him pass
Along the valley where the snow lay blue,
The plodding, silent, ragamuffin crew
Behind him. So the evil days began.

Now Crazy Horse, they say, was like a man
Who, having seen a ghost, must look and look
And brood upon the empty way it took
To nowhere; and he scarcely ate at all;
And there was that about him like a wall
To shut men out. He seemed on longer young.
Bleak January found them on the Tongue
In search of better forage for the herd —
A failing quest. And hither came the word
Of many walking soldiers coming down
With wagon guns upon the starving town
That might not flee; for whither could they go
With ponies pawing feebly in the snow
To grow the leaner? Mighty in despair,
They waited on a lofty summit there
Above the valley.


Raw gray dawn revealed
A scaly serpent crawling up a field
Of white beneath them. Leisurely it neared,
Resolving into men of frosty beard
With sloping rifles swinging to the beat
And melancholy fifing of their feet
Upon the frost; and shrill the wagon tires,
Sang rearward. Now the soldiers lighted fires
And had their breakfast hot, as who should say:
" What hurry? It is early in the day
And there is time for what we came to do. "
With wistful eyes the rabble of the Sioux
Beheld the eating; knew that they defied
In vain their own misgivings when they cried:
" Eat plenty! You will never eat again! "
It was not so; for those were devil men
Who needed nothing and were hard to kill.

The wagon-guns barked sharply at the hill
To bite the summit, always shooting twice;
And scrambling upward through the snow and ice
Came doggedly, without a sign of fear,
The infantry of Miles. They didn't cheer,
They didn't hurry, and they didn't stop,
For all the rifles roaring at the top,
Until the gun-butt met the battle-ax.
Still fighting with their children at their backs
The Sioux gave slowly. Wind came on to blow,
A hurrying northwester, blind with snow,
And in the wild white dusk of it they fled.

But when they reached the Little Powder's head,
So much of all their little had been lost,
So well had wrought their hunger and the frost,
One might have thought 'twas Dull Knife coming there.
The country had a cold, disowning stare;
The burned-off valleys could not feed their own.

The moon was like a frozen bubble, blown
Along the rim of February nights,
When Spotted Tail, the lover of the Whites,
Came there with mighty words. His cheeks were full,
His belly round. He spoke of Sitting Bull
And Gall defeated, driven far away
Across the line; of Red Cloud getting gray
Before his time — a cougar in a cage,
Self-eaten by a silent, toothless rage
That only made the watching sentry smile.
And still the story saddened. All the while
The scattered Sioux were coming in to save
Their children with the food the soldiers gave
And laying down their guns and making peace.
He told how Dull Knife's fury did not cease
But grew upon the soldier food he ate;
And how his people fattened, nursing hate
For Crazy Horse. And many more than these
But waited for the grass — the Loup Pawnees,
The Utes, the Winnebagoes and the Crows,
Shoshones, Bannocks and Arapahoes,
With very many more Dakotas too!

" Now what could Crazy Horse's people do
Against them all? " said Spotted Tail, the Wise.
And with the ancient puzzle in his eyes
That only death may riddle; gazing long
Now first upon the fat one in the wrong
And now upon the starving in the right,
The other found an answer: " I could fight!
And I could fight till all of us were dead.
But now I have no powder left, " he said;
" I can not fight. Tell Gray Fox what you saw;
That I am only waiting for a thaw
To bring my people in. "